Social Networks play an important role as a medium to propagate information among people. Marketers use the medium to campaign for their products and influence customers. However, the enormous size and connectivity of the social network can also facilitate propagation of negative information in the social network. The spread of the negative information, if not addressed properly, can rapidly tarnish brand images.
Stemming any flow of negative information can be particularly difficult because it may not be possible to reach out to every customer in the social network to correct the negative information. Previous attempts to limit the effect of the spread of negative information in a social network rely on a key assumption that the network status of the entire social network is available. However, it is difficult to assess the network status of large real-world social networks.